Amazon’s Q2 Profit Increases $1.8B in 2015; Shares Surge

Amazon has announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2015. The company’s net sales increased 20% to $23.18 billion in the second quarter, compared with $19.34 billion in Q2,2014. It earned $0.19 per share in second quarter and its net sales increased 27% compared to the second quarter of last year.

Amazon generated operating cash flow of $8.98 billion during this quarter, and earned net income of $92 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared with net loss of $126 million, or $0.27 per diluted share, in second quarter 2014. The company enclosed the quarter with $10.23 billion in cash and equivalents.

Amazon’s AWS cloud compute and storage division has revenue of $1.82 billion during the quarter, up sharply from $1 billion in same -period last year. Operating Income was $391 million for the quarter, again an increase from a year-ago operating income result of $77 million.

For the second quarter, sales in North America, the company’s biggest market, rose 25.5 percent to $13.8 billion in the second quarter from a year earlier due to having strong demand for electronics and general merchandise.

For third quarter, the company forecast that net sales are expected to be between $23.3 billion and $25.5 billion, or to grow between 13% and 24% compared with third quarter 2014. Also, the company estimated an operating loss of $480) million and an operating income of $70 million for the third quarter.

“The teams at Amazon have been working hard for customers,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “We unveiled Amazon Business, opened Amazon Mexico, launched Prime free same-day, rolled out our ninth Prime Now city, broke our Black Friday record with the first-ever Prime Day, received 11 Emmy nominations for Transparent, debuted six new kids pilots, brought Echo to general availability, introduced the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service, opened FBA Small and Light, continued to double down on our fastest growing geography — India, launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year (ahead of last year’s pace), introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40% renewable energy.”